Tag Archives: storm

Little coffee shop, upstairs nook
With good pastries, good company, good books,
Rich conversation, literary dictation.
One friend’s dissertation
Just published—her own treatise—
Her girlfriend’s a genius:
Smartest couple I’ve ever known
And literature is our creed,
So we sit here and read.

The other guy is alone:
This man’s just approached us out of nowhere
Oblivious to our recalcitrant glares
And he swoops in now, leading
With an unfunny comment on the book I’m reading.

Reluctant introductions: I’m struck by his daring—
If that’s what you can call unabashed staring—
But as he sits
I admit
I’m suddenly wary
‘Cause I notice the front of the shirt that he’s wearing:
Some TV show merch he’s proudly bearing.
He points to the book I’m carrying,
And when he says, “I love that show!”
I confess some enmity starts to grow—
And internally I start swearing
When he says, “Haven’t read the book, though.”

Conversation is initially slow and half-hearted
But it’s not long before he gets started:
“I think books are boring. Just my opinion…”
He opines as he surveys his dominion,
Following some unsexy,
Erudite comment made by me.

Not a good start, I think,
You’re already too close to the brink,
And across the table, my friend stares at me,
Silently begs me, Easy….
A telepathic warning that I am ignoring.
Still, I resist the urge to ask if directors reading
Movie scripts before forming
Summer blockbuster masterpieces that he so greatly adores,
Is just as much of a terrible bore.

The food is delicious, and he, while settling into his seat,
Boorishly sits and eats
As my two friends, slightly bitterly
Hold court on some anachronistic aspect of literary history,
When this guy suddenly insists,
“But those are all old-fashioned stories!
Books are just too out-of-date
To compete with modern cinema in this day and age.”

On the surface appears the first ripple of sound.
Somewhere on stage a drumstick clatters to the floor
and echoes through the empty cavern in which
two thousand people sit on the edge of their seats,
knowing everything is about to change.
But this silence, the silence before the storm
is agonizing — two thousand breaths
are waiting to released with the first downbeat.
Below us the sea is swirling, the voices filling
the air around us as the lightning grows in the distance.
The storm is awakening. First, the hushed murmur
of violin bow on guitar strings, and soft touches
of fingertips on instruments, with a low hum of a bass note
rumbling below all other sounds.
And then —

A cymbal crash and the music bursts
into a wave full of sound and fury, rushing
through the stadium in powerful bass gales
while the thunder from the drum kit fills the room.
The tempest increases as
we sit on the deck, in the nosebleed seats,
and watch as the storm brews below me
We seafarers are merely trying to survive
this musical maelstrom, in little row boats of expectation,
waiting anxiously for the first rush of water
into the hulls of our ships, but being unprepared
for when the sound-waves crash over the ship into our bodies,
instantly drowning any emotional stability we ever had.
Catharsis through cloudburst.